Joseph Milstein is the founder and managing partner of Gamma Point Advisory, an M&A and strategic advisory firm focused on the logistics and supply-chain sectors. He writes on antisemitism, Israel and American civic life.
(Oct. 16, 2026 / JNS)
On the third anniversary of the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust, conservative podcaster Tucker Carlson aired 103 minutes of television built on one premise: that the Oct. 7 attack was not what it appeared to be and that its victims have since been exploited to capture American policy.
Carlson called the attack “pretty weird,” replayed a 2023 clip of Turning Point USA co-founder Charlie Kirk wondering about a “stand-down order,” and handed the microphone to comedian and talking head Dave Smith, who spent an hour explaining that America has been captured by a foreign government and its agents at home.
Consider the host: In 2024, Carlson gave a platform to right-wing podcaster Darryl Cooper, who cast Winston Churchill as the chief villain of World War II. In October 2025, Carlson gave a friendly hearing to far-right “groyper” Nick Fuentes, a Holocaust denier and self-described admirer of Hitler; an interview that split the conservative movement and forced the Heritage Foundation’s president to apologize for defending it. Two months later, StopAntisemitism named Carlson its “Antisemite of the Year.”
Smith, whose debate with pro-Israel British journalist Douglas Murray made Smith the right’s loudest voice against Israel, has called Fuentes a “fellow traveler.”
Carlson’s Oct. 7 anniversary program was engineered to sound reasonable. It opened with condolences and insisted that killing civilians is always wrong. Then, claim by claim, it built a world in which only one party to the war has agency and only one party’s dead require explanation.
Carlson asked: How could the most guarded border on earth fail? Israel’s own investigations answer that: Commanders were convinced that Hamas was deterred, an attack plan was dismissed as aspirational, a southern front thinned out. That is negligence, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s resistance to a state commission of inquiry is a genuine scandal.
But negligence is not a stand-down order. Carlson prefers a conspiracy theory because simple failure proves Israeli incompetence, while the conspiracy theory alleges Israeli guilt for the murder of Israeli children.
Carlson even mischaracterizes the clip of Kirk, who said he was not willing to claim that Netanyahu knew about the coming attack. Kirk then spent two years as one of Israel’s most forceful defenders.
He says “hundreds of thousands” of Palestinians have been killed in the ensuing war, citing satellite photos but no other proof. In fact, Gaza’s Health Ministry counts about 71,000 dead without separating fighters from civilians. Israel’s military reportedly accepted this figure in January, though Israel holds that numerous Hamas terrorists—perhaps half the total casualties—were among the dead. That is still a grievous civilian toll, and no one should minimize it. But Carlson triples it.
Moreover, proportionality in the law of war weighs civilian harm against military aims strike by strike. It has never meant matching body counts. By Carlson’s arithmetic, America’s answer to Pearl Harbor was a crime.
In addition, Hamas built its military infrastructure beneath its own civilians, held 251 hostages in tunnels and civilian homes, and vowed to repeat Oct. 7 again and again. Yet, for an hour and 40 minutes, neither Carlson nor his guest assigns Hamas responsibility for a single death.
It is the oldest conspiracy theory there is, with ‘Israel’ written where another word used to go.
Carlson then likens Israel’s war to Wehrmacht reprisal executions. Reprisal killing is the deliberate execution of captives, which Israel has not committed.
More than 40 Americans were killed on Oct. 7. Yet Carlson tells viewers that they were not really American because they held dual citizenship. He further claims that hostage Edan Alexander “wasn’t even technically an American.” In fact, Alexander was raised from infancy in Tenafly, N.J.; graduated from its high school; and was a U.S. citizen when Hamas took him hostage. His own government negotiated his release on that basis.
U.S. law recognizes no second-class citizens. Suggesting that a Jew with two passports is less American than his neighbors is the dual-loyalty charge delivered in a calm voice.
Smith called Oct. 7 a “war crime” because a war was “already going on,” citing a blockade “since at least 2007.” He skips 2005, when Israel withdrew every soldier and settler from Gaza, and the 2007 Hamas coup that led Israel and Egypt to impose the blockade. Smith calls Gazans Israel’s “own people” in an Israeli “prison,” which makes Israel alone responsible and erases Gaza’s actual government.
He further asserts that “every single” Oct. 7 killer “was first brutalized by the Israeli state.” That claim cannot be tested. It exists to place the cause of Jewish deaths in Jewish hands.
Neither man says what Israel should have done with 251 hostages under Gaza’s homes and a Hamas government promising to strike again. A critique with no alternative is not policy. It is a verdict looking for proof.
Both men treat it as settled that America is at war with Iran “for Israel”; that U.S. President Donald Trump was boxed in; and that someone must “have something on” him and his cabinet. Smith called the pro-Israel community a “fifth column.”
Beyond the issue of defamation, this deletes the role Iran played in bringing on the war. Before June 2025, the International Atomic Energy Agency counted about 440 kilograms of uranium enriched to 60% in Iranian hands, enough for roughly 10 weapons with further enrichment. The agency has been unable to verify the whereabouts of that material since.
Carlson calls Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) a “lunatic” for saying Iran has been killing Americans for 47 years. In fact, the Pentagon attributes at least 603 U.S. deaths in Iraq to Iranian-backed militias, which does not even count the attack on U.S. Marines in Beirut in 1983 or on U.S. military forces in Jordan in 2024.
You can oppose the Iran war; serious people do. But a podcast that claims that an American president cannot reach his own conclusions, every official who agrees with him is compromised, and a foreign nation and its domestic agents steer the world’s strongest power is simply not based on reality or realism. It is the oldest conspiracy theory there is, with “Israel” written where another word used to go.
In Carlson’s “report,” we see many things, including the insinuation that Jews engineered their own massacre. Nazi analogies for the Jewish state. Dual citizens recast as foreigners. A “fifth column.” Officials who must be blackmailed. A Jewish billionaire, Leon Black, offered as the emblem of who really benefits from all this. A history of Israel in which “a bunch of people from Eastern Europe showed up,” erasing three millennia of Jewish presence and the roughly half of Israeli Jews whose families came from Arab and Muslim lands.
Each item alone might pass as hard criticism of a government. Together they track the examples in the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) working definition of antisemitism adopted by most Western democracies—a definition Carlson calls a gag order.
Carlson closed his monologue by demanding universal standards that apply to everyone, regardless of faith. I agree. Apply them to Hamas. Apply them to Tehran. And apply them to two men who spent the anniversary of a massacre transforming it into an indictment of its victims.